3 Apartheid

Chapter 3 Apartheid Most white people in South Africa were descended from either British or Dutch settlers. The Dutch South Africans were called Afrikaners. They formed their own political party, the National Party, also called "the Nats." In 1948, when Nelson was twenty-nine years old, the Nats won control of the government by a slim margin.

The Nats believed black people were inferior to whites. According to the Nats' laws of apartheid, everyone had to be labeled by their race: white, black, colored (people who were mixed race), and Indians (South Asians who had come to South Africa from India). If there was any doubt as to a person's race, tests were given, like having a pencil poked into their hair. If the pencil stuck, they were colored and not white. Marriage between races became illegal. Buses and schools were separated by race. Many of these laws already reflected the way people were living, but once they became official law, it was going to be much harder for anything to change for black South

Africans. Most black South Africans lived outside city borders in neighborhoods called townships. The townships were crowded. The houses were often simple shacks with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Black workers left the townships to work for white people in the city during the day, and then were forced to return to the townships at night. SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES JIM CROW LAWS WERE ENFORCED IN MUCH OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH FROM 1877 TO THE MID-1960S. THESE LOCAL AND STATE LAWS KEPT BLACK PEOPLE AND WHITE PEOPLE SEPARATE. IN MANY WAYS, THESE LAWS WERE NOT SO DIFFERENT FROM APARTHEID. UNDER JIM CROW LAWS, BLACK AMERICANS COULD NOT SIT ON BENCHES RESERVED FOR WHITE PEOPLE, ATTEND

WHITE SCHOOLS, OR EVEN DRINK FROM WHITE WATER FOUNTAINS. ALSO, BLACK PEOPLE WERE EXPECTED TO ACT A CERTAIN WAY AROUND WHITE PEOPLE. A BLACK PERSON WAS FORBIDDEN FROM SHAKING HANDS WITH A WHITE PERSON. BLACK PEOPLE HAD TO ADDRESS WHITES FORMALLY, EITHER "MISTER" AND "MISS" OR "SIR" AND "MA'AM," WHILE WHITE PEOPLE CALLED BLACKS ONLY BY THEIR FIRST NAMES. ON THE ROAD, WHITE DRIVERS EVEN HAD THE RIGHT-OF-WAY AT ALL INTERSECTIONS! When Nelson Mandela and his friends learned that the Nats had won the election, they were stunned. For years the Nats had preached about the "swart gevaar," or "black danger," and white superiority.

Nelson realized he could never work within the government as he had hoped. He and the rest of the Youth League would have to fight back through protests and acts of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience means peacefully breaking laws to show that the laws are unfair. In 1950 the white government made all protests, peaceful or not, illegal. Nelson was becoming known as a protest leader— in other words, a troublemaker. He was living up to the name he'd been born with, Tree Shaker. He and Oliver Tambo, whom he had first met at Fort Hare, opened a black law firm—the first in Johannesburg— and they represented poor black defendants in court. Their clients were accused of all sorts of crimes. It was a crime to walk through a door marked for white people. It was a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed at the wrong place. Nelson also represented people who had been evicted from their homes because their neighborhoods had been declared white areas. Nelson was a powerful figure in the courtroom, arguing for civil rights. He had a natural authority. But as he spent more and more time fighting for his

clients, he saw less and less of his family. When he came to the hospital to see his newborn son, Makgatho, his five-year-old son, Thembi, asked, "Where does Daddy live?"